Jonathan Israel is a British historian, and one of the world’s leading scholars in early modern and modern colonial history, Enlightenment studies, Dutch history, and Jewish studies. His work in all of these fields has transformed current scholarship all over the world. Israel’s recent work has been focused on the impact of radical thought, on the Enlightenment and on the emergence of modern ideas of democracy, equality, toleration, freedom of the press, and individual freedom. His books include Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (2002); The Enlightenment that Failed: Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748-1830 (2019); and Spinoza, Life and Legacy (2023). He has been awarded many times, recently with Comenius Prize 2017, PROSE Award 2015 and City of Amsterdam, Frans Banninck Cocq Medal 2012.

Abstract

This lecture, a concluding contribution to the conference The Enlightenment and Liberalism: Continuities and Discontinuities Between the Eighteenth and the Nineteenth Centuries seeks to present an overview of the Liberalism of early nineteenth-century Europe emerging in the wake of the Congress of Vienna of 1815. The incompleteness and gaps of the Counter-Enlightenment reaction across much of Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat quickly created a deep crisis of restored monarchy, aristocracy and church authority which arguably proved conducive to a far more optimistic Liberal tendency in the 1820s than historians have often been willing to acknowledge. The main thrust of this contribution is to consider, by adopting Nathaniel Wolloch’s characterization of the divide between moderate and radical Liberalism, the relationship of these linked tendencies to the prevailing pre-1800 pattern of division of the Western Enlightenment into moderate and radical tendencies. The central question is: how far was the tension between the two wings of early nineteenth-century Western Liberalism in essence just an extension of the two conflicting tendencies that shaped the Enlightenment and how far had they transitioned into an essentially new framework?